Bookpedia : Library : Genre : [Global:Letter]

ISBN: 9780375424304

ListPrice: $25.95

Edition: First Edition

Summary: •Within days of being born, we are infected with billions of "E. coli. "They will inhabit each and every one of us until we die. "E. coli "is notorious for making people gravely ill, but engineered strains of the bacteria save millions of lives each year. •Despite its microscopic size, "E.coli" contains more than four thousand genes that operate a staggeringly sophisticated network of millions of molecules. •Scientists are rebuilding "E. coli" from the ground up, redefining our understanding of life on Earth. In the tradition of classics like Lewis Thomas's "Lives of a Cell", Carl Zimmer has written a fascinating and utterly accessible investigation of what it means to be alive. Zimmer traces "E. coli"'s remarkable history, showing how scientists used it to discover how genes work and then to launch the entire biotechnology industry. While some strains of "E. coli" grab headlines by causing deadly diseases, scientists are retooling the bacteria to produce everything from human insulin to jet fuel. "Microcosm "is the story of the one species on Earth that science knows best of all. It's also a story of life itself--of its rules, its mysteries, and its future.

ISBN: 9780743272056

ListPrice: $15.00

Edition: Revised

Summary: In "Soul Made Flesh", Carl Zimmer reveals the strange and complicated history of the discovery of the human brain. Amid the turmoil of 17th century England, with religious leaders and monarchs battling for control of the country, an elite group of thinkers used every scientific means at their disposal to figure out that the unassuming putty in our heads was crucial to human health and wisdom. Primary among these Oxford scholars was Thomas Willis, whom the Royal Society affectionately called "our chymist." "Soul Made Flesh" is as much a biography of Willis and the men who shaped him as it is a medical history. Zimmer admirably sets the stage for what would become a metaphysical revolution and spark arguments that continue to this day about what the mind is and where, if anywhere, the human soul resides: Thomas Willis... isolated the soul from stars and demons and made the chemical workings of the brain the key to sanity and happiness. Just as important, he helped make the brain a familiar thing. Zimmer applies the same dedicated research and quietly sparkling style to this book as he did to "Parasite Rex" and "At the Water's Edge", distilling reams of historical and scientific information into a concise yet comprehensive narrative. The book's chapters are accompanied by drawings by Willis' contemporary Christopher Wren, whose architectural sensibilities made the brain's structure beautiful to behold. "--Therese Littleton"

ISBN: 0684856239

ListPrice: $15.00

Edition: New Ed

Summary: Everybody Out of the Pond "At the Water's Edge" will change the way you think about your place in the world. The awesome journey of life's transformation from the first microbes 4 billion years ago to "Homo sapiens" today is an epic that we are only now beginning to grasp. Magnificent and bizarre, it is the story of how we got here, what we left behind, and what we brought with us. We all know about evolution, but it still seems absurd that our ancestors were fish. Darwin's idea of natural selection was the key to solving generation-to-generation evolution -- microevolution -- but it could only point us toward a complete explanation, still to come, of the engines of macroevolution, the transformation of body shapes across millions of years. Now, drawing on the latest fossil discoveries and breakthrough scientific analysis, Carl Zimmer reveals how macroevolution works. Escorting us along the trail of discovery up to the current dramatic research in paleontology, ecology, genetics, and embryology, Zimmer shows how scientists today are unveiling the secrets of life that biologists struggled with two centuries ago. In this book, you will find a dazzling, brash literary talent and a rigorous scientific sensibility gracefully brought together. Carl Zimmer provides a comprehensive, lucid, and authoritative answer to the mystery of how nature actually made itself.

ISBN: 9780061138409

ListPrice: $15.95

Edition: Revised

Summary: While its opponents may sneer that "it's just a theory," evolution has transcended that label to take its place as one of the most important ideas in human history. Science journalist Carl Zimmer explores its history and future in "Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea", a companion piece to the epic PBS series of the same name. The book, lavishly illustrated with photos of our distant cousins, anatomical diagrams, and timelines, is as beautiful as it is enlightening. While those closely following the field will find little more here than a well-written summation of the state of the art in 2001, readers who have watched the evolutionary debates from a distance will quickly catch up with the details of the principal arguments. Zimmer's text is fresh and expansive, explaining both the minutiae of comparative anatomy and the grand scale of geological time with verve and clarity. Following the trend of turn-of-the-century evolution writers, he treats the religious beliefs of creationists with respect, while firmly insisting that the scientific evidence against their position is too compelling to ignore. Touching on biology, philosophy, theology, politics, and nearly every other field of human thought, "Evolution" will inspire its readers with the elegance and importance of Darwin's simple theory. "--Rob Lightner"

ISBN: 074320011X

ListPrice: $15.00

Edition: Eigth Printing

Summary: For decades parasites were the pariahs of science, considered too aberrant and insignificant to study. Only recently have biologists begun to appreciate that these diverse and complex organisms are the most highly evolved life forms on earth. In this compelling, gracefully written work of popular science, Carl Zimmer takes us on a tour of the strange and bizarre world that parasites inhabit -- and delightfully recounts the fantastic voyages of these wonders of creation. Parasites can: rewrite DNA; rewire the brain; genetically engineer viruses as weapons; and turn healthy hosts into the living dead. From a lab in California where the grisly secrets of parasitic wasps are coming to light, to remote Sudan, where the subtle horror of sleeping sickness is threatening millions of lives, Parasite Rex follows researchers in parasitology, one of the hottest fields in biology, as they attempt to penetrate the mysteries of these omnipresent creatures who control evolution, ecosystems, and perhaps the future of the human race. It is life science at its most thrilling -- by a writer who, according to John Horgan, "brings evolutionary biology to life more vividly than anyone in recent memory".

ISBN:

ListPrice: 54.00

Edition: Collector's Edition

Summary: By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science's greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick's desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

ISBN:

ListPrice: 54.00

Edition: Collector's Edition

Summary: It's hard to talk about "The Origin of Species" without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable. To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here. Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the "Origin", "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. "--Mary Ellen Curtin"

ISBN: 074321630X

ListPrice: $15.00

Edition: Reprint

Summary: By identifying the structure of DNA, the molecule of life, Francis Crick and James Watson revolutionized biochemistry and won themselves a Nobel Prize. At the time, Watson was only twenty-four, a young scientist hungry to make his mark. His uncompromisingly honest account of the heady days of their thrilling sprint against other world-class researchers to solve one of science's greatest mysteries gives a dazzlingly clear picture of a world of brilliant scientists with great gifts, very human ambitions, and bitter rivalries. With humility unspoiled by false modesty, Watson relates his and Crick's desperate efforts to beat Linus Pauling to the Holy Grail of life sciences, the identification of the basic building block of life. Never has a scientist been so truthful in capturing in words the flavor of his work.

ISBN: 0393316823

ListPrice: $16.95

Edition: Reprint

Illustrator: Lalla Ward

Summary: How do species evolve? Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most eminent zoologists, likens the process to scaling a huge, Himalaya-size peak, the Mount Improbable of his title. An alpinist does not leap from sea level to the summit; neither does a species utterly change forms overnight, but instead follows a course of "slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants"--a course that Charles Darwin, Dawkins's great hero, called natural selection. Illustrating his arguments with case studies from the natural world, such as the evolution of the eye and the lung, and the coevolution of certain kinds of figs and wasps, Dawkins provides a vigorous, entertaining defense of key Darwinian ideas.

ISBN: 068482471X

ListPrice: $16.00

Edition: Reprint

Summary: One of the best descriptions of the nature and implications of Darwinian evolution ever written, it is firmly based in biological information and appropriately extrapolated to possible applications to engineering and cultural evolution. Dennett's analyses of the objections to evolutionary theory are unsurpassed. Extremely lucid, wonderfully written, and scientifically and philosophically impeccable. Highest Recommendation!

ISBN: 0393315703

ListPrice: $15.95

Edition: Reissue

Dimensions: 1.01 x 8.36 x 5.44 in

Summary: Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson's research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style: I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that could, in principle, solve the mystery of our existence. The title of this 1986 work, Dawkins's second book, refers to the Rev. William Paley's 1802 work, "Natural Theology", which argued that just as finding a watch would lead you to conclude that a watchmaker must exist, the complexity of living organisms proves that a Creator exists. Not so, says Dawkins: "All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way... it is the "blind" watchmaker." Dawkins is a hard-core scientist: he doesn't just tell you what is so, he shows you how to find out for yourself. For this book, he wrote "Biomorph", one of the first artificial life programs. You can check Dawkins's results on your own Mac or PC.